Baby Plants

We ordered 44 packets of food seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds for this year's garden (they sent us 2 free extra packets so we have 46 food seeds to start now!).  And we also ordered 11 packets of flower seeds because I want to have cut flower bouquets all summer long this year.  

It cost us about $100, but we hopefully will be overflowing with produce this summer and not do much grocery shopping.  And maybe we'll even be able to sell some of our bounty.  Plus a lot of the seed packets had enough that we can use the seeds for next year's garden as well.

We have MAJOR garden plans this year.  MAJOR.  Our garden will probably be the same square footage of our house.  A lot of that will be allowing enough space for the things that will take over (pumpkins, squash, & cucumbers), but still.

Now we are not crazy people, we are not digging up that much sod in one year.  Corey found a method where you cover up the grass with newspaper or paper grocery bags and just cut holes for each seedling.  Then the grass dies and the next year it's easier to incorporate it as compost.  So we're going to go that route.

The seeds were so minuscule for some of them we had to use tweezers to plant them!  So far we have only started tomatoes, peppers, basil, cilantro, chives, asparagus, lettuce, onions, and petunias.  I think we have more due to start this weekend.

3/18

3/24

We bought organic potting soil and fluorescent lights at Menards and ordered plastic seed trays & popsicle sticks from Amazon. 

Corey built the wooden stand to hold all the trays & lights.

3/29

Lettuce won for first sprouted

3/30

onions

We put our heating pad under the peppers to warm up the dirt more in hopes of encouraging sprouting

tomatoes!

4/1

Soon I will be buried in tomatoes...13 different varieties!

I hope the basil takes off soon

Weirdly bent over onions

Tiny baby pentunias

So far there's only one pepper sprouted

In three years we'll actually be able to harvest some rhubarb

Crafty Homestead Garden Notebook

Today was a very good mail day because my two new journals came!  I used Christmas money to treat myself to expensive custom journals.  They are from Paper Source and could not be cuter or more awesome.  When I finish my current To Do List journal and my writing-thoughts-down journal I will replace them with Paper Source journals.

Things I Love About These Notebooks:

• my pens fit into the spiral
• pens don't bleed through to the other side of the page
• they are spiral so they lay flat and can be folded in half
• they are so pretty
• I got 10% off the order

One journal (pictured above) is for all things garden.  When we were house (originally land) hunting I had a notebook that I kept everything in.  As we saw properties & took notes on them and made various lists everything was all in one place.  It was so nice to grab that notebook and know that anything that I would want to reference was in there.  No lists or notes were lost along the way.  I also do that for my To Do lists now.  I love having them all in one place and I love buying cute notebooks!

So I customized the cover of the notebook with "Crafty Homestead Garden."  I didn't put 2015 because it has so many pages I am sure we get at least two years out of it.  I picked grid paper for the inside because I want to sketch out garden bed plans in it among other things.  This way as the summer goes on and I want to write myself notes to reference when I'm planning next year (too much zucchini, move pumpkins next year, etc) they will all go in one place.  And when I want to remember what exactly we planted in that corner over there, I can flip back to the beginning and see the plan that I sketched out in Spring.  

For now I have two pages used already.  One is a list of what we want to plant this year and one is a list of goals for 2015 (based on what I struggled with last summer).

In case you can't read my handwriting I typed them out.

What To Plant This Year:

• tomatoes - grape, black krim
• basil
• cucumbers - regular, pickling
• carrots
• kale
• lettuce
• zucchini
• butternut squash
• pumpkins
• onions
• garlic
• green onions
• peppers
• brussel sprouts
• potatoes
• broccoli
• cauliflower
• sweet potatoes

2015 Garden Goals:

• stay on top of trimming & harvesting the basil
• make enough pesto for the year
• stay on top of weeding
• work on tomato bursting
• regular, deep watering
• try succession planting
• expand the garden dramatically
• check zucchini daily to avoid growing crazy monsters
• do fall planting again
• more than just garlic?
• keep track of how much we plant so we know how much more/less to plant in 2016
• do more from seeds than last year
• (which was zero) 

I want to get to the point where we are growing most of the vegetables that we need for the year.  So storing potatoes, onions, & garlic in the basement and freezing broccoli florets and canning tomatoes, etc.  I know it'll take several years to figure out how much we need to plant of each kind so that we have enough for the whole year, and documenting how much we plant this year is the first step.  Once we know how much to plant to feed ourselves the goal will change to planting enough to have some to sell.

My other notebook I personalized with my initials and used datebook pages on the inside.

 

This will be my planner.  A lot of my To Do Lists will move in to this notebook, along with meal plans for the week, and hopefully soon a work schedule.  It has lots of pages so it should be good for at least a year if not two.  I love that the Month spot is blank so you can start using this whenever you want in the year.  Plus if you miss a week you won't be wasting any pages.  The last column on the right is just a "Notes" column and I like having space that is not assigned to a specific day.  I used this week's blank spot for the grocery list :)

Garlic

A hill!

The seed garlic came!  I ordered them from an online seed company called High Mowing Organic Seeds.  They were pretty expensive, but hopefully if they grow well we will be able to save our own seed garlic next year.  They came in whole bulbs which surprised me.  They are chesnook red variety.

Mr. Pup wanted to eat some:

Then I split up all the bulbs into the cloves for planting.  68 cloves in all which if they turn into 68 bulbs is way more than we could eat in a year.  We are hoping to have enough left for seed for next year and then we won't have to buy them again.

The paper came off those 2 cloves so I'm going to use those now because the online guide I found said to plant them with the paper on.

Oliver was really helpful while we planted. Not. He kept rubbing his head on the hands that were busy planting trying to get petted.

But before we could plant Corey had to clear out the garden which looked like this:

Dead & weed-filled much?

And after, all cleaned up & clove-filled:

That whole square is filled with garlic believe it or not!

Now we just need to cover it with some sort of mulch/straw/leaves for winter.

Hopefully this crop will be successful and we won't be out $$$ for organic garlic or have to buy more seed again next year.

Lessons for Next Year's Garden

This post wasn't supposed to publish today, but it's the only draft pretty much ready to go, so here we go.

Next year we will do the garden a bit differently because of what we learned this year and because we will have more time to plan it out and MORE SPACE.  So here is a big list of our garden goals for 2015:

1.  We will have smaller RECTANGULAR garden beds.  It was so hard to check on the middle of the garden this year.  Which is why there were 2 huuuuuge zucchini that were escaping me.

2.  The snakey things like cucumber and butternut squash will be isolated so they don't take over.  We couldn't mow by the garden anymore and the squash got covered in grass.  And next year we will add in a pumpkin patch, too.

3.  We will plant waaaaay more tomatoes.  We will plant probably 5 times as many of the big heirloom ones, no medium sized ones, and the same amount of grape tomatoes.

4.  I will do better with weeding.  Since we left right after we planted everything got out of control and it got hard to tell what was what and catch up.

5.  We will plant more peppers.  We got 3 from 1 plant which was awesome and I want to see if we can be even more successful next year.

6.  I want to do seasonal plantings.  Starting with some fall plantings!  I need to look into that.  I know garlic gets planted in the fall and that's where my knowledge ends.

7.  Lettuce!  We kinda missed the boat on that this summer.  And carrots, more cucumber, more zucchini, rhubarb...

8.  I vow to do better with keeping up with trimming the basil. And I want to plant way, way more of it!

9.  I want to buy started plants whenever we can because I think it is what helped us a lot this year.  But I have a feeling with some things we'll have to start from seed because of availability.

10.  We want to move into the fruit arena.  We need to get fruit trees going and plant more berry bushes.

11.  I want to have mulched paths between the beds and around the edges of the garden area so that it makes mowing easier.

12.  Rain barrels. I want to water from them as much as we can.  I hate using up our well water for plants.

Now hopefully I will remember to reread this in the spring!